Plain talk
By Mursi Saad El-Din
On Sunday 20 April, the French President Nicoals Sarkozy attended a state funeral of Aimé Césaire, poet, playwright and political freedom fighter from the Caribbean Island Martinique. The French president praised Césaire as a great poet and a great man. This Sarkozy did inspite of the fact that Césaire allied himself with the Socialist Party in France and supported Segolene Royal, Sarkozy's opponent, in the 2007 French elections.
But who is Aimé Césaire? As the British newspaper The Independent describes him, Césaire is "The most influential Francophone Caribbean writer of his generation." In the African continent and in Egypt, we know him also as one of the founding fathers of Negritude together with Léopold Sédar Senghor. Césaire was also the driving force behind the French language magazine and publishing house African Literature established in 1947.
My first introduction to Aimé Césaire was in 1959 when I listened to his address to the Second Congress of Negro Writers and Artists held in Rome from 29 March to 1 April. In his speech entitled "The Man of Culture and his Responsibilities," Césaire underlined the importance of literature and art in the struggle for African national liberation and independence. "In the conditions which surround us," he writes "the greatest ambition of our literature must be to strive to become a sacred literature, of our art to become a sacred art [...] artistic creation by its own force must mobilise the virgin emotional forces to re-establish the society whose power of resistance and will to strive have been undermined by the shock of colonialism."
Aimé Césaire was born in Martinique in 1913. After attending his public education in his motherland, he won a scholarship to study in Paris. He arrived in France in 1931 at a time when intellectual debates about African distinctiveness was gathering momentum. Along with the Franco- Guyanese Damas and the Singhalese Senghor, he launched the magazine L'etudiant noir, in 1943. According to John Thieme in The Independent, they drew inspiration "from the Harlem Renaissance efforts to promote the richness of the African cultural identity, and particularly opposed French assimilation policy."
During those years, Césaire began to develop the ideas for his great masterpiece Cahier D'Un Retour Au Pays Natal (1939) which was published in English translation in 1969 under the title Return to my Native Land.
In this poem, Césaire explores the distinctiveness of black cultural identity in a historically grounded manner that prefigures the black consciousness movement of the 1960s, the decade, in Thieme's words "when it became popular in the English-speaking world. " Cahier D'Un Retour Au Pays Natal is stylistically varied, moving between impassioned prose outbursts against injustice, and a moral lyrical mode that celebrates black ancestry.
Césaire was a very politically engaged writer, and in 1945 he was elected mayor of the capital of Martinique Fort-de-France, a position he held with just one brief interruption until 2001. He also became, like Senghor, a deputy in the French National Assembly, where he served from 1946 to 1956, and again from 1958 until 1993. Césaire played a pivotal role in the formulation of the policy of departmentalisation which integrated his country in France according to the law of departmentalisation passed by the French National Assembly on 19 March, 1946. This was some sort of Commonwealth, similar to that created by Britain following the end of World War II. As a result of his advocacy of integrating his country into France, many people came to feel that Césaire's critique of colonialism was not radical enough.
This criticism notwithstanding, Césaire will always be remembered for his work against the exploitation of African peoples, and for developing the notion of negritude which he saw as "a historical phenomenon that had evolved from commonalities in the post- colonial history of African peoples, particularly the experience of the Atlantic slave ships and plantation slavery."
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2008/895/cu3.htm